Antonio put the present for sleeping Tareja into his mother's hands. It was a wonderful American doll with yellow hair and with eyes which would shut and open, and it was dressed all in white, just as Joanna had sometimes, on rare visits to Guimarães, seen foreign children dressed.
Then how gleefully they all laughed at the next present which Antonio brought out! It was for the house,--a china salt-cellar, red and round like a tomato.
"We must put it in the cabinet. It is too fine to use except on holidays and feast-days," said the mother.
Jose's present was the last to appear. Now it was the little boy's turn to receive a paper-covered package, tied with pink string.
Jose's short fingers trembled in impatience as he untied the string,--careful, even in his haste, not to break it, for a piece of string was very precious to the boy.
Off came the paper and out came a square white box. Off came the box-cover and out came an engine and four gaily painted cars,--such a wonderful toy as Jose had never seen before.
It was an evening always to be remembered in the Almaida family. They looked at one another's presents. They listened to Antonio's tales of great American cities and railroads and bridges, of active, rapid-moving people, and of his own work as foreman on a section of railroad diggers.
By and by the mother saw that the father, in his arm-chair, was growing tired. So she told the children it was time to go to bed, because they could hear more to-morrow about all these things.
Jose took the engine and cars, the box and the pink string to bed with him, and held them clasped in both hands to make sure that the treasures were real.
He was very wide-awake. He heard his mother and Antonio talking after they had helped the father to his bed. And the little boy never forgot Antonio's last words to his mother that night:
"Before I went away from home, mother, you said to me 'Each morning, resolve not to do anything during all the day which will make you feel sorry when night comes.' I remembered that each morning, mother, and it kept me always from wrong ways and wrong places."
"Trees manifold here left their branches tall, Fruit laden, fragrant, exquisite and rare." --_Camoens._